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Thursday, 8 January 2015

So, dearest of blog-follower, it's early AD2015 and you are still a desperate-enough individual to act upon your requirement of the emotional assistance of both Messrs Cocktail and Hiscox-Wormegay. Ordinarily I'd make urgent-but-vague recommendations that you find yourself either a person of ill repute and spend a couple of days getting the New Year Blues out of your system, but as I am only writing here as a guest, I must remember some basic webiquette.

Advanced plumbing.

Shortly before the New Year insanities began, my servant girl Bertha was pumping water in the yard and my ears made hear of a commotion in one of the outhouses. I shouted at her to do her damned job and make herself aware of the situation with a view to rectifying it, but the smithy at Marten's Forge is dragging his heels over my new pump - and the squeaking is unbearable! To cut a yarn into shorter bits of yarn, Bertha was not able to hear the racket from the outhouse, ergo she didn't attend the issue. So I had to.

The lickspittle, Bertha.

Being a gentleman of reasonable standing, I tended to my first responsibility - beating the servant girl. But she is a girl of fortune and, at 73 years, is a good twenty years my junior - and escaped! Lickspittle slodger tramp.

So, without assistance, I ventured into the outhouse. I have yet to install electric lighting in the outhouses as I don't often have the need to go in, and there is a good provision of part-burned candles for the estate staff. But on this occasion, an Edison filament bulb would have been most welcome for, at the end of the room, there was the Hoover laundry box. It was making a terrible din! It was lurching from side to side like the gin-soaked women queued at the almshouses in the towns, and a great many glowing sparks accompanied a loud and constant crackle.

Eventually, I resolved to send a telegram to the local repairman. He is a man of limited intelligence, owing, in the main, to his coming from The Midlands. Regardless of his geographic shortcomings, I sent the telegram, demanding he attend the estate and either repair the laundry machine or shoot it. When he arrived, it was immediately apparent that he had not brought his shotgun, nor his veterinary trappings. Instead, he produced two small, L-shaped contraptions, which he termed 'brushes'. Being a man of the world, I pride myself on having amassed a good mental inventory of equipment associated with the arts, and these were emphatically not brushes. However, it must be said that whatever devilry this man brought onto the estate, it silenced the Hoover laundry box and enabled me to hunt down the wretched Bertha, wearing clean breeches.

Given that I don't fully comprehend the workings of these so-called 'brushes', I am disinclined to offer them a rating, irrespective of how well they do their job.